High-rated coins to buy. Deceptive, imitation coins to avoid.

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This is especially important right now with our highest-rated cryptocurrencies on fire …

Cardano rose from its 2018 low of US$0.14 to a recent high of $0.38.

NEO went from $44.62 to a $92.63.

EOS has surged from $4.01 to its recent high of $21.13!

Plus more.

This doesn’t mean they’re risk-free. Periodic price declines and even crashes are normal in the crypto world. But their recent price gains are a testament to all the factors we consider in our ratings — their innovative technologies, solid adoption metrics and excellent promise for the future.

I have written frequently about these super coins. They are truly worthy of your investment dollars.

At the same time, I have warned you away from the coins to avoid.

I’ve told about The Flaws of Bitcoin Copycats, such as Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin God and others that provide only minor improvements in technology but suffer from major deficiencies in adoption.

Yet, some of these seem almost forgivable in comparison to the schemes I’m going to tell you about today …

The Serial Coin Imitator

If the man fools me once, shame on him.

If he fools me twice, shame on me.

And if we let him get away with it a third time, shame on all of us.

Who? I typically don’t name names, but this case seems so egregious to me, I will cite two: Everett Forth and Rhett Creighton.

“What did they do?” you ask.

Actually, they’re the same person. He used to go by the former name. Now he uses the latter. So I’ll just refer to him as “the serial coin imitator.”

His modus operandi: He basically takes a project that’s already out. He forks it (copies the existing code). He changes a few meaningless parameters. He re-labels it. And then he promotes it as “the next big thing” in crypto.

The saga begins with …

ZCash’s Innovation:
Zero-Knowledge Proof

ZCash is an innovative project by an honest team of developers, pioneering a unique, new privacy feature called “zero-knowledge proof.”

This allow individuals to prove they own something — or that they have a certain critical faculty — without revealing who they are, what they own or what the faculty is.

ZCash has all kinds of possibilities: For example, it could make it possible to hold free elections on a blockchain, preventing fraud, protecting against hacking, as well as assuring that each voter’s ballot remains confidential and untraceable. This is a big deal.

But then, along comes the serial coin imitator, launching a series of three imitation coins. To better understand how he does it, let’s go back in time and walk through his projects, coin by coin …

Imitation #1ZClassic

It’s 2016, and the serial coin imitator has a simple plan:

First, he grabs the innovative genius from ZCash by copying their code.

Second, he (with his team) cooks up a rationale for making a minor change: He argues ZCash developers have created an annoying “miner tax,” which collects money from coin miners to fund work by developers. And he bashes the implied centralization.

Next, he deletes that one small piece of the code; touts his project as more decentralized; boasts he’s taking the higher moral ground; and positions his project as “truer to the core philosophy of cryptocurrencies.”

His real agenda: To cash in on the innovations made by the ZCash team and disguise the fact that his work is just a cheap imitation.

Imitation #2Bitcoin Private

Fast forward to early 2018.

Apparently, copying ZCash isn’t quite enough. So the serial coin imitator makes a new announcement: He and his team are forking ZClassic itself into another coin named Bitcoin Private.

And get this: The reason for the fork is that they want to introduce a “voluntary miner contribution” program to their original ZClassic.

The say it’s different. But it means they’re essentially adding back the same “miner tax” they had previously deleted.

Now, Bitcoin Private is truly identical to the original ZCash, except for meaningless differences. The only noteworthy change is the branding. They figure going back to the tried-and-tested name “Bitcoin” will earn them more visibility.

Imitation #3Bitcoin Prime

This brings us back to the present.

After misleading investors by creating Bitcoin Private, building some hype around it, and making some big money in the process, the serial coin imitator is not giving up.

Click image for a larger view.

Based on one of his recent Tweets, it looks like he wants to grab the code of a nearly dead cryptocurrency called PrimeCoin, fork it into a new one he calls “Bitcoin Prime,” and start the game all over again.

To their credit, back at Bitcoin Private, the team bid the serial coin imitator a not-so-fond farewell.

Time for Investors to Wake Up

We recently conducted a poll about this on Twitter. We asked users to select which coin they believe is more closely aligned with Satoshi’s original vision — Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Private. Surprisingly, the majority selected Bitcoin Private.

So it seems many people have yet to catch on. But there are notable exceptions …

On social media recently, some people have been slamming Bitcoin Prime project.

Leave a comment

Comments 3

Dennis M FlowersMay 5, 2018

Needless forking may be bad for crypto, but Bitcoin Private has become a thriving community and truly decentralized project. The Zcash team now works for JPMorgan. I challenge you to take a deeper look into BTCP and it’s team. I guarantee by the end of the year it not only warrants a rating but receives a good one.

JimMay 9, 2018

Bitcoin Prime is to be a community developed coin, created by a team of people who want to create something new, and and improve upon other crypto currencies. Isn’t that what innovation is about? None of this team are being paid by anyone, and the development is entirely open sourced and anyone is welcome to contribute, its decentralised development, a decentralised team, how it should be. It’s not about 1 person.

Rhett simply tweeted the idea, and that Primecoin is undervalued.. It is, and he’s involved with advising the dev team.. Nearly Dead? Maybe you should look into primecoin and its creator Sunny King. This was built in a time when it was about the technology, not about people wanting Lambos. Many coins we see today wont last as long as primecoin has, And guess what, PrimeCoin is a fork of Bitcoin.. Infact, many coins are, and lots of them have not changed much code either.. You might even find your own computer uses lots of ‘copied code’ from other developers.. I think you are misunderstading how software development actually works.

If a project brings focus back to this old coin, and promotes meaningful proof of work, and innovates, then whats the problem? There are other reasons and motivations to develop cryptocurrency than to make its price go up to please ‘Investors’

Maybe you are just suggesting that buying Primecoin is not a good investment right now.. Maybe you’re right, I don’t have any myself, but I guess we will see.. But that’s no reason to insult people giving up their free time to innovate in this space. The amount of hate in this space is increasing every day and these kind of ill informed opinions are not helping. As a dev myself, its very discouraging.

Anyone buying PrimeCoin is not investing in the project, they are not paying the developers of the project, and the development of this coin wont change depending on the price of the coin, its somewhat irrelevant.

Tom MallonJune 10, 2018

I received your email with the 93 Crypto rankings, asof May 24

Where can I go to review the rankings as of today, June 10?

Thanks

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